Life & numbers

The past six months my time has been mostly spent on reading numerous books and scientific articles about media, Russian political situation and discourse analysis. Last Thursday at the DW Akademie I presented my Master's thesis called "Representation of Russian protesters in online media".

In 2011 -2012, as you might remember, Russia has experienced the biggest wave of protests in the last decade. The protesters filled the streets of Russian big cities to demand fair parliamentary and presidential elections, resignation of Vladimir Putin, as well as, registration of opposition parties and liberation of political prisoners like Khodorkovsky.

I attempted to analyse how the protesters were represented during the manifestation rallies from the four Russian online news websites reporting in English: Russia Today, Russia Beyond the Headlines, Gazeta and St. Petersburg Times. Social Actors’ Approach, developed by Theo van Leeuwen within the Critical Discourse Analysis, was adopted to carry out the research and interpret the collected data.

In spite of many similarities in covering the manifestation rallies in the four websites, the analysis concluded that there existed differences in representing the protesters that indicated the media subjectivity and their political affiliation.